Wednesday, March 4, 2015

RICHARD PRYOR: AMERICAN ID (Day 5)

The days tick by.
Routines get set. Problems get solved… or they don’t.

As per usual, the
writing day started with editing: a return to yesterday’s 4043-word monstrosity,
which is still pretty good, and too long with no easy solutions. I did find a
way to rework the opening paragraph into more of a grabber, which is good—but if anything, I came away from this morning’s
edit session with the realization that it’s a paragraph short,that there’s a vital connection that I need
to make to the overall theme of the book to keep it from being just a
standalone “How about this, isn’t this interesting” sort of thing. So that’s a
little time bomb that’ll just sit there ticking for the rest of the week, I
suppose; I really should use this end-of-day time to figure that graf about,
but I’m too afraid of that essay at this point, to be honest.

The better news is
that today’s essay, about the character of Mudbone and the traditional of African-American oral storytelling, is not only fairly solid, but a totally manageable 2725
words. So, hurray for that, at least.

Looking back over
this stuff, I realize that the word count obsession may seem a little OCD, or at the very least, disproportionate. But I just see it as a kind of mathematical
indication of the material getting away from me, which was always my concern
when it came to tackling such an immense subject in a short form.

Anyway. That’s the
latest. With the two reworked essays and three new ones down, and three ones to
go, I’m officially past the halfway point. The next two essays are ones I feel
pretty good about, and think I should
be able to keep under control. The last one, which I’m planning on writing
Saturday, is a bit of a stickier wicket, particularly since I’ll need to figure
out how it’ll answer the book’s Big Questions, which I sort of provocatively
pose in the preface but haven’t entirely worked through yet. Guess we’ll burn
that bridge when we come to it!

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I started writing about films for a small monthly alternative rag in my hometown of Wichita, Kansas, back in 1998. This was primarily as a distraction while I was pursuing my own interests as a filmmaker. Now, over a decade later, I've written for alt-weeklies and several websites (including my current gig as film editor for Flavorwire), and I've found that I tend to enjoy writing about films more than I enjoy making them. Plus, it's faster!